Sixty per cent of you were correct; that type of spending is about 40% of UK government spending. If the UK government really wanted to make cuts, that is the place to start.

It would also appear that the second largest item is welfare and pensions* spending, but not by a huge margin, it's a bit more than 30% (but no more than 35%) and the total salary and pension costs of six million public sector employees is a bit less than 30% (but no less than 25%).

* Three-quarters of that is old age pensions of course, working age welfare is surprisingly small amounts.
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The comments to my previous post show that there is quite a divergence of opinion as to whether integral garages are a good idea (rather than having an extra downstairs room).

That's entirely a matter of personal taste and preference of course (for example, if you have motorbikes or bicycles etc which you need to store securely), but what's the majority opinion?

The only way to test this is to observe the real world and compare how many people have converted an integral garage into an extra downstairs room and vice versa.

Bank bail outs and guarantees, arts council and film subsidies, windmill subsidies, green subsidies, agricultural land subsidies and housing benefit, PFI and PP overspend, export guarantees, most of DFID spending, overspend on weapons (what MoD get up to is incompetent to the point of being criminal, troops are dying and they don't care), IT projects (NHS Spine), all the Work Programme and A4E type stuff, carbon permits-auctions, spending money on removing harmless white asbestos, tax breaks/subsidies for pensions companies, HomeBuy schemes, Funding for Lending scheme.

Most of these items are in the £1 billion to £10 billion per annum range, none of them in isolation would bankrupt us, but if you have thirty or forty biggies, then it all adds up.

Basically all the welfare spendingis a small fraction of the total but it has to be there for advertising purposes so that the parasites can say "You want to cut government spending - you nasty person you want to starve the widows and orphans".

I am sure a lot of the bureaucrats, quangoists and fakecharities would benefit from a little starvation.

Welfare spending is also there so as not to have starving people rioting and damaging landowners' property. Also, having dead bodies on the streets would make us look even more third world than we do now.